Level-based primary vocabulary in teaching Turkish as foreign language -a corpus based application-

This study was carried out to determine the word frequencies of the primary vocabulary elements to be used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language and to determine their contextual appearance and other lexical appearances according to their levels (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1), through corpus-based research. Corpus linguistics, which is the general name for the methods ordered to gather and analyze large-scale natural language samples by means of various programs and software, has saved the language studies from intuitive perspectives with the objective data. The study was carried out through document analysis within the framework of the possibilities offered by the principles and methods of corpus linguistics. In the study, it is intended to fill the gap created by the previous studies in the literature that do not fully reflect the frequency aspect of the words needed in teaching Turkish as foreign language as well as show intuitive features by comparing the vocabulary elements in the language teaching sets used for teaching Turkish as a foreign language with the seven-hundred-million-word reference corpus "TS Corpus" (The Turkish Corpus) following the corpus-based analysis. It is thought that the elimination of the uncertainty regarding this issue will contribute to the teaching of Turkish as a foreign language. A total of 44 books in 9 sets that are the four-level Altay Set (A1, A2, B1, B2) and eight other sets of 5 levels (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1) prepared by the experts of teaching Turkish as a foreign language were examined based on the opinions of the experts in the field to compose the specialized Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language Corpus (TTAFLC). Each stage of this study, which was handled in line with the principles, methods and purposes of corpus linguistics, the sections such as methods, data collection techniques, analysis and evaluation of data were carried out through "ABBYY Fine Reader 15, WordSmith 5.0" programs and "TSCorpus" special software and substructure. The scanning and digitizing of the texts, the preliminary analysis of the digitized data in the "WordSmith 5.0" program, and the final reporting by bringing them into "TSCorpus" software were followed respectively. The need for advanced linguistic applications in addition to the previous laborious studies at the point of teaching Turkish as a foreign language reflects the purpose of this study. The "TTAFLC", which was created with 1,127,145 words at the first stage, took its final form of 1,043,992 vocabulary units after removing the parts-words-spaces that were not related to the purpose of the study and correcting the wrong parts and units.